After a series of three betas and one release candidate, the KDE
Project used the occasion of the first day of the Linux World Expo
in San Francisco, CA toannounce
(alternate with fixed
table) the much-anticipated stable release of KOffice 1.1. KOffice
is a free, Open Source,
integrated office suite demonstrating the richness and power of the KDE
development environment. The announcement contains links to the
source and binary packages as well as a good deal of information about
the current features of the KOffice packages. A candid assessment by
yours truly follows.

Like all of KDE, the interface of each KOffice application is really slick
and gorgeous. The available functions are easy to use. The KOffice
developers have again demonstrated their canny ability to make the
transition from other office suites as easily as possible, but making
improvements and innovating where appropriate.

The feature set
is probably adequate for the great majority of users (and the price tag can't be beat!).
For example,
KPresentation is great and has many useful and snazzy features, but
lacks layers and the ability to easily reproduce layers across
selected pages. KWord is easily up to the task of generating nice letters,
letterheads, memos, faxes and papers, but lacks hyphenation,
mail merge (or any database integration) and endnotes/footnotes.
Similar stories for the other applications.

But, with all due respect to the diligent work of the filter developers, the biggest obstacle
to KOffice right now is the filters for MS Office documents. So while I will make
KOffice my primary office suite, someone who (1) has a repository of .doc
files; and/or (2) receives many .doc files by email; and/or (3) needs to collaborate on document production with someone tied to non-KOffice formats, and/or (4) has unusually
demanding office needs, will likely not be happy with KOffice as their exclusive Office Suite (yet -- things are improving quickly!). I hope all the Open Source office developers (Abiword/etc., KOffice, Open Office) can collaborate on writing filters for the extremely complex and poorly-documented proprietary formats into an intermediate, standard-based XML format).

Comments

Actually I think it looks like Katabase has been replaced/superceded/evolved into/whatever rekall by theKompany. And it looks very good so far (only up to version 0.5 (beta 3), but is shaping up to be VERY good).

It' so far can use MySQL, PostgreSQL or xBase files as a backend, uses Kugar for reports (I think) and the form logic is programmable in Python.

Has anyone had a problem with KDE printing,
where the print produces HUGE .ps files that
are 3-10 times larger than similar files
produced by other apps? In particular, I have
in mind files produces by mozilla and konqueror.
Also, sometimes, .ps files produced by KDE
apps are unreadable by ghostscript, and many
printers (esp. HP) do not interpret them
correctly. Is this a known issue or am I
doing something wrong?

I've seen this too. It appears to be because QT converts TTF fonts to postscript and includes them in the file. And it appears to forget some of them. Today I had to edit an output postscript file and change a Misc-fixedList to a VerdanaList to get a document to print properly.

It definitely needs some looking at, but I'd wager it's a QT thing, not a KDE thing.

Didn't in the last release candidate for KOffice, and I believe won't here. The KDE developers have a WYSIWYG branch of Kword in CVS, so it should work in the future. At the moment this is KWord's biggest missing feature as I found out to my loss when working on a presentation using KWord.

Replying to myself. Just installed it and it doesn't. In case anyone doesn't understand this limitation of KWord, try typing a full page of text in a big point font. Then zoom out to 33% and see how the layout changes. In my document I only realised this at the end of writing it, and I had to keep doing print preview and adjusting it to get it write. This is pretty silly.

Abiword behaves correctly in this manner, so I currently use that for my word processing needs.

Hopefully KOffice 1.2 will address this - until it does I'll not be able to use KWord unfortunately (which is a shame because I like everything else about it apart from it's ability to accurately lay out words!).

Yes, it's not in 1.1, and I'm working on this.
The code in CVS (HEAD branch of course) already has WYSIWYG support, so this is almost done. Feel free to test it and report bugs. The current known issue is that it leads to quite big spaces between words, I might have to add some pixels between the letters in some cases to prevent that. But in any case the printing is _really_ WYSIWYG (the text is always flown at the same high resolution internally - same solution as Abiword's).

Didn't in the last release candidate for KOffice, and I believe won't here. The KDE developers have a WYSIWYG branch of Kword in CVS, so it should work in the future. At the moment this is KWord's biggest missing feature as I found out to my loss when working on a presentation using KWord.

Kivio supports plugin stencil sets. theKompany has many more available for 5 or 10 dollars. However it would be very nice if more free stencil sets were available by default.

One thing I am interested in as UML stencils. The "Basic UML" stencils at theKompany just don't cut it though. Dia is awesome for UML diagrams, and there's no reason why Kivio can't be either. Anyone interested in making some UML stencils?

I agree, and am thinking about bulding some UML stencils in my spare time. I havn't the time right now to start programming stencil sets, and I can't find the "stencil builder" anywhere. Is there any docs or HOWTOs on programming stencil sets?

i tried to install/use this
what a mission and it got me no where :)
i reccomend you either have a doctors degree in science or leave it untill you have many hours to spend to get this working.
the install file helped me nothing,

"copy this script in the xfig-library path
kivio don't handle a deep directory structure, so you have
to "flatten" the structure (see *stencils-*.bz2) - this are already
generated stencils"

thats al it said, and i tried to follow instructions but it got me no where
thanks anyways, and kivio is an awsome tool, but i think ill wait till i have more patience or that doctors degree ;)

Great work Koffice team. Koffice is shaping up very nicely. The hard work that has gone into this project is very evident. And the best part is that it is only going to get better. I can't wait to see where this app goes. Speaking of which here is a WISHLIST for future versions:
1. underline mispelled words as they are typed
2. "New table" in the table menu
3. "Delete table" in the table menu
4. Make table UI more MS Word like
5. Text to table
6. Shading (as in borders and shading)
7. More styles

By more Word like I mean rather than selecting a cell, modifying the cell width/height which modifies the row/column hight you sould get that "resize" cursor when you mouse over a cell border and resize only those cells that are selected, or all if none are selected.

Again big ups. This is a great product from a great team of dedicated opern source developers. If I have time, I would like to add some of these items myself.

As a newbie, I'm just wondering why the developers don't pour their development efforts into porting OpenOffice to KDE rather than duplicating all this work in KOffice. As a newbie, I will probably go with Gnome as it (I understand) will use OO as its main office suite? At present OO on windows works very well, has M$ Word, Excel, etc. importing that work well, and is WYSIWYG. Comments?

OpenOffice is 400 MB of source code (!), and some of StarOffice hasn't been made opensource (AFAIK).
So it's all quite messy....

Why do I spend my time on KWord rather than on porting OO ?

1) because I think it's MUCH more fun :-)

2) because I believe we have the right tools within Qt/KDE (and the koffice libs) for a great office suite, using all the KDE technologies
(for instance, is openoffice network transparent ? I strongly doubt it - or if it is, it's a duplicated effort wrt all the kioslaves KDE has ;-) Do you realize that you can now save a koffice document directly onto a FTP server, optionnally using a secure connection (kio_sftp slave) ?
Embedding, configurable toolbars, etc. etc. all of this comes for 'free' for any koffice application.
Right-to-left editing (for hebrew/arabic) will come with very little or no effort, with Qt3, etc.

3) because KOffice will remain much more lightweight than staroffice/openoffice, even for the same features, especially when used within KDE (with all the libraries already being loaded).

4) KOffice is very well designed, which helps extending it step by step. Starting from very old sources (with not such a great design) doesn't help at all. I'm not saying this is the case with openoffice (haven't checked the sources), but in general, several-years-old sources (often C) are no match to new, well designed, object-oriented code (like C++).

Interesting reply. Question : What happens then for example re imports filters. Can you / do you grab the Open Office code and modify it. This would seem sensible. As someone currently trying to get rid of all M$ stuff (just sold my copt of M$ office), I need an office suite that will replace it. At present, that is OO build 638. Or is it more efficient to start from scratch?

I don't personnally work on the filters (only on KWord and the KOffice libraries), but I know that those who do have had a look at the other available filters (e.g. wvware).
I'm actually not sure that the filters from OpenOffice are opensource - at least, at the beginning they weren't.

Anyway, two koffice developers are currently working with the AbiWord filter developers (wvware library) on a common layer for importing MSWord documents. One area where work won't be duplicated anymore, between the two opensource projects.

Also, KOffice might switch to ZIP instead of tar.gz, for technical reasons, bringing more compatibility with OpenOffice. No promises though, just evaluating this at the moment.

I've had a look at the OO filters, but couldn't get my head around them. I was considering doing a powerpoint filter for Kpresenter, but there is very little in the way of documentation for powerpoint file formats, and I couldn't work out how OO was doing it. Though the OO filters are very good, using OO638 powerpoint files open perfectly. Maybe I should have another look.

A suggest talking with one of the OO developers. The filters are indeed the best non MS filers for MS programs available (heck, they open even files Word itself chokes upon..*grin*). But it will be difficult to copy them to koffice due to complete different designs of the filter system. What it can do however is, give you information about undocumented binary stuff in the file format.
really really talk with one of the OO people!

I mean, why port the filtering parts when you could probably encapsulate them, have them convert to OO format (which is what they do in OO anyways), then use KWord's OO filter. Can anyone tell me if this would be at all feasible?

1) KDE does not do what GNOME is doing merely because GNOME is doing it. Hopefully the reverse situatin is true as well.

2) KOffice was started before the OpenOffice project got started. We were there first.

3) It is much more efficient to start an Open Source project from scratch rather than to start with a recently opened proprietary code base. Konqueror started much later than Mozilla, but still finished earlier.

Don't get me wrong, OpenOffice is going to be great when it's done (just as Mozilla will be). But that doesn't scratch the "itch".

Would it be possible to write a plug-in for MS Word that would allow it to read this proposed XML standard? Or does RTF already satisfy the needs of people wanting to take their documents from KOffice to Word?

The reason I have to use MS Word at home is because I use it at school; if a 30 second install at school allowed me to write the KOffice format in Word then I wouldn't have any interoperablity problems. Granted, for people who are recieveing .doc from other people this wouldn't be very useful, but it would for me.

I've just installed KDE2.2, and went on to install KOffice 1.1. However, I get the following dependency-problems:
$ rpm -Uvh koffice-1.1-2.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
libcrypto.so.2 is needed by koffice-1.1-2
libexpat.so.0 is needed by koffice-1.1-2
libssl.so.2 is needed by koffice-1.1-2

To get around the expat problem, I just had to install expat-1.95, but the libraries from openssl seems trickier. It seems that they're called libssl.so.0.96 in the version I have, but if I try to install an RPM where they're named .so.2, I get an error because several packages are using them.

I seems that a lot of people have been able to install KDE2.2 and KOffice1.1 on RH7, could you please help me find the right packages?

Yes, I've had similar problem with RH7.1 - RedHat distributes
required libs in separate RPMs called openssl095a, openssl096.
You should be able to find them with rpmfind or in redhat-rawhide
distrib. (though I'm not sure if they'll work with RH7.0)
Hope this helps...